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Digitizing/Displaying Objects

I’ve been considering how to digitize and display objects, mostly because I have an object project that is coming my way. Our original plan was to put a 3D scan of the object on-line, but any 3D scanner that we could afford wasn’t going to be good enough, so I’ve been looking at different options.

Option 1-Just pictures

We could just take a few pictures of the object with a neutral background and good lighting. In this case we would treat the collection more like an image collection.

Option 2- Flash application

My husband and I were looking for cameras and we found this site for Olympus cameras. The cameras are ok, but what I was really surprised about was the display!

You can click on the camera and move it around, seeing all different sides. Some of my colleges assumed that it was a 3D model, but I could tell that it was just a series of images taken and strung together using a flash application. At work, we are working on implementing this for at least our first object collection.

I’m planning on getting a cheap turn table (for a kitchen table), covering it with neutral gray paper, marking it around with 365 degrees, and then taking 365 photos of the object from slightly different angles. Once I start this, I’ll probably post pictures and a step by step process.
While I’m doing that, one of our IT people, or our Metadata librarians, are going to be researching the flash application to see how easy it will be to string the images together. This should be fun.
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